Farmers and firefighters mark 10 years since Pinery bushfire hit SA's Mid North

Ten years after the Pinery bushfire hit South Australia's Mid North, Freeling farmer Corbin Schuster still remembers the image of the fire coming towards him.

"It was night and day — blue skies and then as the fire approached, it was completely black like night," he said.

At about 12:30pm on November 25, 2015, Mr Schuster saw a "small puff of smoke" to the far west of his farm.

"It kept getting bigger and turning blacker, and then at about one o'clock we thought this isn't going to be too flash," he said.

Sparked by a car battery accidentally left in a paddock during a Total Fire Ban day, the bushfire would burn through more than 86,000 hectares — roughly the size of Greater Adelaide — over the next week.

It claimed two lives — Janet Hughes, 56, and Allan Tiller, 69 — and destroyed nearly 100 homes and more than 70,000 livestock.

Pinery showed 'the power of nature'

On Sunday, more than 300 people gathered at the Freeling Farm Centre to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of an event that "affected everyone out here", according to Mr Schuster, who lost 95 per cent of his crops.

"Everyone in the Pinery region finished harvest on the same day, but not for the reason they wanted," he said.

"We never met a fire we couldn't control. It was always just a matter of throwing more resources at it.

Assessing the damage

By December 2, when the Country Fire Service (CFS) withdrew all warnings, the extent of the damage became clear.

Farmer and CFS volunteer Neville Kernich, a deputy group officer at the time, said the immediate aftermath "looked like a war zone".

"We live on a hill and looked out and you could see all these bits smoking, and that was all the hay sheds we'd lost on the previous day," he said.

"All these farms that had Aleppo pines, if they weren't burnt, they were taken down by excavators because they were a big fire hazard."

The clean-up began immediately, with volunteers clearing more than 590km of fencing and hundreds of burnt-out trees.

"It was very humbling … several days later on the weekend, we had an army of people come in and help us," he said, singling out aid organisation Blaze Aid.

Trauma remains but 'we will fight on'

Mr Kernich said if it happened again, he believed another "Pinery-style fire … wouldn't be as bad as the first time".

He said people were more diligent in maintaining fire breaks and farm fire units now, and the CFS had made water bombing aircraft more available.

"It didn't matter how good your equipment was that day, it was the preparation and homework you did that avoided the fire," he said.

Sunday's ceremony ended with the planting of a commemorative eucalyptus tree outside the community centre.

Light Regional Council mayor and farmer Bill Close, who planted the tree, narrowly avoided losing part of his property in the blaze.

"It developed more and started coming quite quickly towards my property, and I was getting very, very anxious about it," he said.

"But then the wind changed; it had been blowing from the west and suddenly came from the south and pushed the fire up north, and it moved very, very quickly."

Mr Close said the fire left "a huge trauma" across the state's Mid North.

"We are a strong community and we will fight on," he said.

Lessons learnt

For others, like 19-year-old Luke Gale of Freeling, the fire prompted him to enlist in the CFS cadets at the age of 11.

"I was at school at the time and I remember just an ordinary day, sunny and warm," he said.

"I was going through the hallway, we looked out the window and it looked like a storm on the horizon.

"Watching it come over, you're panicking, and you don't know what comes next.

"Dad's coming to pick me up, he wasn't a [CFS] member at the time, now we both are. I remember jumping in the car, going home, Dad and my sister going inside to grab the go bags and there were ashes coming down on us."

His family escaped to Morgan via the Thiele Highway, with cars out of Freeling "bumper to bumper".

"The fire was that quick that we could see the flames following us," he said.

"I would love to have known the stuff I know now. If people get educated, do their bushfire survival plan, it's a miracle what it will do."

According to Mr Schuster, the lessons from Pinery have been resounding.

"There's a lot more communication between farmers on a windy day where there could be a fire, there's a lot more text messages and a lot more talking on the UHF [radios]," he said.

"Now we know what fire can do, what it can behave like when the conditions are right.